Later, the company uploaded a piece of concept art to its Facebook page, linking to a recruiting drive for its Kyoto office.

The art shows a girl and some sort of creature, apparently peaceful companions, in a grove of large trees with grinning faces. The tone is exploratory rather than menacing.

The job ad and image has led to rampant speculation that Monolith Soft has a 3DS RPG in the works in addition to a new RPG for Wii U codenamed X, as revealed in a recent Nintendo Direct.

X is in production at Monolith Soft’s Tokyo office, and the Kyoto, which opened in mid-2011, was recruiting for a 3DS project last year. However, MonolithSoft already has an established handheld team in Tokyo, responsible for Project X Zone, and the Kyoto team did contract work on Animal Crossing: New Leaf, so don’t get too excited about that idea yet.

That said, the teaser video for X is below; you can see it looks reasonably different from the art shown.

Monolith Soft was founded by a group of former Squaresoft developers in the wake of Chrono Cross. It was largely owned by initial investor Namco Bandai before being sold to Nintendo.